Belong’s music has evolved gradually across two decades of sporadic activity, moving from their abstract drone beginnings toward something resembling actual rock songs. At times, the change seems to have crept up on them. Speaking with an interviewer around the release of their second full-length, 2011’s gothic, expansive Common Era, the New Orleans duo expressed a note of bafflement about the way the album was landing. “People have been citing shoegaze a lot in reference to the new album and that actually took us a bit by surprise,” said Turk Dietrich, adding, “We don’t feel any relation in aesthetic, harmonically or sonically, to most of the artists from the early ’90s shoegaze movement.”
If Deitrich and his bandmate Mike Jones once struggled to hear the influence of shoegaze on their music, 13 years later, they seem to have come around to the idea. The duo’s third album, Realistic IX, doesn’t necessarily sound influenced by the shoegaze movement as a whole; it sounds inspired principally by the shoegaze band, My Bloody Valentine—specifically their landmark 1991 album Loveless. Hit play on the album’s opening track, “Realistic (I’m Still Waiting),” and it’s all there right from the jump: the gauzy, smudged guitar riffs; the androgynous angel sighs; that general sense of warp and weft, as if the track itself was being bent out of shape by a gigantic tremolo arm.
Living rent-free in another group’s soundworld is seldom a good look—particularly when it’s as distinctive as the one Kevin Shields created. But Dietrich and Jones are seasoned sculptors of sound, with an instinctive grasp of layering textures and shaping feedback. And whereas much of the current crop of shoegaze revivalists approach the sound in a somewhat basic way—bit of fuzz on the guitars, check; vague sense of ennui in the vocals, check—on Realistic IX, Belong have locked on better than most to My Bloody Valentine’s alien side: that vaporous, synthetic quality that made Loveless feel untethered from familiar rock’n’roll touchstones and adrift in the direction of something new.
Luckily, Belong are canny enough not to recreate My Bloody Valentine’s masterwork stroke by stroke. Dietrich and Jones approach the Loveless formula with intent, like detectives reopening a cold case and sifting the evidence in search of a new way forward. Where Loveless featured live drums—albeit sampled and extensively reassembled by Shields—Belong make use of drum machines, giving their rhythms a blockier, more mechanistic feel. And while Loveless’ lyrics are famously hard to parse, Realistic IX takes the spirit of obfuscation further still. “Souvenir” and “Jealousy” follow a familiar verse-chorus progression, but the blurred-out vocals are wholly unintelligible, deployed purely for their sound and feel. Indeed, you get the sense that Dietrich and Jones remain drone to the bone, seeking moments of epiphany not in the stuff of songcraft but in the careful manipulation of texture and tone.
The result is some distinctly other sounding music. “Difficult Boy” crackles with a strange, synthetic intensity, its swerving shoegaze chords spliced to a pounding, machine-like rhythm reminiscent of Suicide. “Bleach” sets a drum machine in orbit around a roar of psychedelic harsh noise. Two standout tracks explicitly reference electronic dance music. “Crucial Years” imagines an alternate reality in which Shields got really into the dub techno of Basic Channel or Pole, underpinning grainy washes of feedback with stuttering pulsations, while the closing “AM/PM” chains its airy drones to a four-to-the-floor rhythm—a simple enough idea, but it works like a charm.
In the hands of a more opportunistic band, this sort of pivot towards shoegaze in the year 2024 might feel like an attempt to elbow their way into the TikTok zeitgeist in the hope of scoring some sort of viral payday. But it seems unlikely that Belong, long content to remain in the shadows, care a jot for any of that; they appear interested mainly in bending rock music to its breaking point. Realistic IX doesn’t entirely land. Belong’s taste for blurry abstraction means the album sometimes sounds slightly undercooked, like a set of production sketches awaiting further embellishment. And the debt it owes to its influences dilutes any shock of the new. But it takes skill and a degree of daring to riff on an album as monumental as Loveless—hell, it took Kevin Shields himself over 20 years to follow it up. That Belong can not just pull off that template but build on it is an accomplishment in itself.
